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Language aptitude remains one of the most understudied predictor variables in L1 attrition research. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the effects of language aptitude on L1 retention in late attriters. Forty L1 Spanish - L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden participated in the study, along with 20 functionally monolingual L1 speakers of Spanish. L1 proficiency was measured by means of a grammaticality judgement test (GJT) and language aptitude data were obtained through the LLAMA Language Aptitude Test (Meara 2005). Additional data on the participants' linguistic background were also collected. Results revealed a robust difference in GJT scores between the bilinguals and the control group. However, degree of language aptitude was not found to exert a significant influence on the bilinguals' GJT performance. Instead, the only significant predictor for GJT performance was linguistic identification, showing that those participants with strong L1 identification were more accurate in judging L1 grammaticality. The lack of aptitude effects on L1 attrition is discussed against the background of age-related attrition susceptibility.

This paper is concerned with media perceptions and how these manifest as hegemonic practices. Exploring the theme ‘language and politics’, against the backdrop of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) demonstrations in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), this paper sheds light on the discursive constructions of media representations in three ‘Chinese’[1] regions as well as on how such representations constitute vested interests. By addressing mediatised social, political and institutional discourses in the ‘Chinese’ context, this leads to an exploration as to how perceptions are embedded within larger socio-political discourses of sovereignty and legitimacy. The focus of analysis is the English-language press in Hong Kong (HK/HKSAR), China (PRC) and Taiwan (ROC). Critical discourse analysis is carried out on a series of thirteen newspaper articles[2] with the objective of making explicit the invisible ‘work’ that discursive strategies do in influencing interpretations and understanding of a political event in a non-Western context. Guided by Martin & White’s (2005) appraisal theory, the analysis views newspaper discourses not only as value-laden texts but by doing so also reveals readers’ and writers’ stance thus dispelling the myth that ‘news’ is objective. Findings depict varied perspectives on the Occupy Central demonstrations – Mainland and HK newspapers’ treatment were rather critical, while Taiwanese perceptions tended towards the analytical. This difference suggests HK and Mainland media as ideologically aligned – hegemonic – and positions Taiwanese media as potentially counter-hegemonic. Amidst issues of declining press freedoms, considerable variations were also found among the HK newspapers suggesting the presence press plurality. Regardless, media hegemony over public perceptions were found not only to contribute to and uphold certain interests vested in the maintenance of ‘Chinese’ sovereignty over HK under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework. Overall, findings confirmed just how influential a role the media plays as an extension of and in the realm of politics as well as in shaping public opinion. Through the lens ‘language and politics’, this paper explores the notion of ‘language’ and ‘discourse’, its functions and significance within non-English/Western national media systems. Such an examination thus highlights concepts and issues relevant in the field of bi-/multilingualism in society.

[1] The term ‘Chinese’ is used in inverted commas throughout this paper and is mainly employed as an umbrella term to refer to the regions of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China for expediency. However, the inverted commas also denote that caution should be exercised when using the term as a referent to either language, culture and/or people as it may index different norms depending on context. This point is further elucidated in the introductory part of this paper as the term ‘Chinese’ is viewed as a social construction.

[2] The data is taken from two newspapers per region with two news articles per newspaper, with the exception of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) where 3 news articles were analysed.

The current study investigates motion event construal in Swedish speakers of L2 Spanish. In particular, the study examines the encoding of motion endpoints and manner of motion through elicited video clip descriptions of everyday motion event situations. The results show that Swedish learners of Spanish exhibit the same, high endpoint frequencies as their monolingual Swedish peers, thus deviating from the Spanish native pattern. Moreover, the learners used the same amount of manner verbs as Spanish natives, but were more prone to give additional manner information in periphrastic constructions. These findings are interpreted in relation to previous literature on the construal of motion events in L2 learners and the notion of conceptual transfer (Cadierno & Ruiz, 2006; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; von Stutterheim, 2003).

This research aims to shed light on language policies and early bilingual education in Sweden. It highlights the main language policies developed by Sweden while framing them within a European perspective, thus comparing the “national” language policies to the “international” language policies, stressing differences and similarities. More specifically, it analyzes the language policies and guidelines related to bilingual education created by the Council of Europe and afterwards applies the same procedure to the Swedish ones. Furthermore, this study investigates the language practices of children and teachers in two bilingual/multilingual settings. In order to do this, the research was framed as a sociolinguistic ethnography and was carried out using observations, interviews and audio-recordings in order to achieve triangulation wherever possible. Interview and observational data were analyzed thematically while interactional data was analyzed to establish the purposes for which different languages were used by participants. In conclusion, this study might give an idea of how appropriate the Swedish language policies are while stressing the need to revise and implement those policies that might affect the success of early bilingual/multilingual preschool education in Sweden.

The present study explores the relationship between participation in mother tongue instruction (MTI), students’ reading comprehension, and their overall school results. The study expands on the results of an earlier study, which found that Somali–Swedish speaking students who had attended Somali MTI for several years, performed better on reading comprehension in Somali, than Somali–Swedish speaking students of the same ages, who had not taken Somali MTI (Ganuza & Hedman 2017a). The present study revisits the results of 36 participants in the earlier study, and explores the relationship between their scores on reading comprehension and their grades at the end of 6th or 7th grade; in MTI, Swedish as a second language, Mathematics, and overall grade points. Most importantly, the results show consistent positive correlations between participants’ reading comprehension in Somali and their school results. This correlation is also stronger and more comprehensive than the one found between their reading comprehension in Swedish and their school results. In the paper, we argue that these results indirectly point to a positive relationship between MTI and students’ school results, which, if confirmed by future studies, is quite remarkable considering the limited teaching time allotted to MTI and its’ marginalized position in the Swedish school system.

This article focuses on the pedagogical beliefs, practices and ideological assumptions of 15 teachers who work with mother tongue instruction in Sweden. Despite support through provisions in Swedish laws, mother tongue instruction is clearly a marginalized subject, not least due to its non-mandatory status, the limited time allocated for it and the fact that the subject and its teachers are often contested in public debate. In this study, the teachers’ narratives center round issues of legitimacy, both for the subject per se and for the teachers’ right to be viewed as ‘real’ teachers. In this paper, we highlight how the teachers link mother tongue instruction to the notion of a ‘common heritage’ and how they see themselves as advocates and role models for the mother tongue. The teachers raise the status of mother tongue instruction in a transformational way, to a subject that is essential and can have a positive impact for a group of students who would otherwise be at a disadvantage in the school system. The undermining of mother tongue instruction was found to affect the pedagogical practices, as the teachers often took into consideration how their teaching would be viewed by parents and colleagues.

This study investigates if participation in mother tongue instruction (henceforth MTI) impacts the biliteracy proficiency of young bilinguals, drawing on examples from Somali–Swedish bilinguals and Somali MTI in a Swedish school context. In the study, biliteracy was operationalized as reading proficiency and vocabulary knowledge in two languages, which was tested with measures of word decoding, reading comprehension, and vocabulary breadth and depth. The study was designed to allow for cross-sectional, longitudinal, and cross-linguistic analyses of data. Overall, the results showed that participation in MTI contributed positively to participants’ results on Somali reading comprehension, beyond the influence of chronological age, age of arrival, and reported home language and literacy use. Furthermore, higher results in Somali were associated with higher results on the same measures in Swedish, in particular for the reading measures. In sum, the results indicate that MTI has an impact on some aspects of literacy proficiency in the mother tongue, despite the restricted time allocated for it (<1 h/week). They also indicate that MTI, albeit indirectly, may benefit the stated proficiencies in the language of schooling.

An ongoing debate within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) discusses the possibility of universal developmental stages in the interlanguage of second language learners. Processability Theory (PT) is one of the theories that enhances this way of thinking about second language acquisition. The belief is that learners go through the same stages of development when learning a new language. An ongoing process in PT is the construction of these developmental stages for individual languages, but today there is still much work needed in this area. The purpose of this thesis is to construct the developmental stages for Dutch, based on an error analysis of second language learners’ interlanguage. The data was collected from Swedish students learning Dutch on a university level. The students were interviewed once per month, and three times in total, so that no developments in their interlanguage could be missed. The data is processed according to the emergence criterion, resulting in developmental tables of the learners’ progress. The result of these interviews provides for the outline on how one acquires Dutch, and together with a grammatical analysis of Dutch word order procedures and morphology, a developmental hierarchy for the acquisition of Dutch according to PT is constructed.

The current special issue of Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies features a subset of the papers presented at the symposium Learning, teaching and assessment of second foreign languages in school contexts held at Lund University, Sweden, in December 2016. The symposium was organised by the TAL-project (Granfeldt et al., 2016), a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council and focusing on the learning, teaching and assessment of second foreign languages (SFLs) in Swedish schools1.

76. Second Foreign Languages in the Swedish school contextGranfeldt, Jonas

et al.

Sayehli, Susan

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Centre for Research on Bilingualism.

This article reports the results of a survey focusing on the educational context of second foreign languages (SFL) to which 147 Swedish secondary school leaders responded. The study aims to provide a picture of how SFLs like German, French and Spanish are organised in a representative selection of Swedish schools across the country. The results of the survey show that there are major differences between languages when it comes to the language offer and the number of pupils and teachers in the respective languages. Moreover, there are also important differences between schools, some of which can be related to educational, socio-economic and regional aspects of the responding schools. A general conclusion of the survey is that conditions for SFLs currently vary across languages and across the country. One of the main challenges for the future seems to be to maintain a varying offer of languages in a majority of schools.

From its inception in the late 1980s to the present day, hip hop culture in Mozambique underwent several stages in which the process of “keeping it real” was in constant negotiation with the association of the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN), and its local cultural and linguistic elements. This article, using tropes of temporality as the main framework, discusses how relocalization of the GHHN is constructed in Mozambican hip hop. There is a progressive connection between the past, present and future which is highlighted by local rappers. The article argues that Mozambican hip hop activism is built through acts of engagement in political tropes, in which local rappers are acting as spokesmen of the marginalized population through lyrics that claim citizenship. The political discourses produced during the Frelimo’s socialist governance era are rescued to challenge the liberal politics developed in the present democratic period, which, in large part, is contested by the population at the margin of the development. Therefore, local rappers’ lyrics address popular complaints related to some political decisions that negatively affect the population at the margins and lead to general societal malfunction. The local African languages that were ideologically marginalized since the colonial regime are now being rescued by local rappers as a way to contextualize them into contemporary, metropolitan and transnational languages. This linguistic relocalization indexes a new present and an aspiration for a different future, where these languages will be inserted together with Portuguese to allow communication in urban spaces. This engagement by rappers can be perceived as acts of linguistic citizenship.

The main argument of this chapter is that knowledge is a phenomenon to be understood in the intersection of discourse and action, and that entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) mediates this relationship. Drawing on mediated discourse analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004; Jones 2013), the chapter explores an online discussion forum thread used by over 200 pregnant women expecting a child in the same month. The empirical examples demonstrate how the participants in this thread exchange information, provide reports and contest knowledge. By way of these examples, the analysis claims that a key process in such knowledge practices is the entextualization of prior actions, often from the private life of the participants. Through such processes, a range of transient actions are treated as a unit, such as an experience, that is given a linguistic form. Recentered in the interaction of the thread, the unit functions as a piece of knowledge for others to draw on. In this vein, the discussion forum becomes a resource for the participants to appropriate control over medical knowledge and the biologically and socially turbulent experience of pregnancy.

This paper is concerned with knowledge as an object of sociolinguistic inquiry. Drawing on some key work in mediated discourse analysis, MDA (Jones, 2013; Scollon and Scollon, 2004), we hold that knowledge is, as it were, a crucial aspect of the processes whereby people take actions with discourses. We frame this pursuit by dwelling on the interwoven relationship between power and knowledge, looking into an online discussion forum thread used by some 200 people who are expecting a child in the same month.

86. Thinking and seeing for speaking

Hayakawa Thor, Masako

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Centre for Research on Bilingualism.

“Linguistic relativity” has been studied for a long time. Many empirical studies have been conducted on cross-linguistic differences to find support for the influence of language on thought. This study proposes viewpoint (defined as the point from which the conceptualizer sees and construes the event) as a cross-linguistic difference, and explores whether the linguistic constraint and preference of subjective/objective construal can affect one’s cognitive activity as viewpoint. As Japanese is a subjectivity-prominent language whereas Swedish is not, data elicited from monolingual adolescences (aged 12-16) in Japan and Sweden were compared. A set of tasks which consisted of non-verbal tasks (scene-visualisation) and verbal tasks (narrative of comic strips) was performed in order to elicit the participants’ viewpoints. The same set of tasks was assigned to simultaneous Swedish-Japanese bilingual adolescences in Sweden. The bilinguals took the set of non-verbal and verbal tasks twice, once in Swedish and once in Japanese. The results demonstrated a clear difference between the monolingual groups both in the non-verbal and verbal tasks. The Japanese monolinguals showed a higher preference for subjective viewpoint. The bilinguals’ viewpoint preference had a tendency to fall between that of monolinguals of both languages. This finding indicates that the bilinguals’ viewpoint preference may be influenced by both languages. This study demonstrates for the first time that the speaker’s viewpoint can be affected not only in verbal tasks but also in non-verbal tasks. The findings suggest that a language may influence the speaker’s way of construing events. It is also implied that the influences from different languages in bilinguals can be bidirectional. However, the influence does not seem to be all or nothing. Regardless of the language, one’s event construal is more or less the same. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that the linguistic subjectivity in a language tends to counteract the universal construal.

We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the 'south' and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Americas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with 'de-colonial theory', and with 'southern' theory, thinking and epistemologies. In these, 'southern' is regarded as a metaphor for marginality, coloniality and entanglements of the geopolitical north and south. Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent 're-awakenings' in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity. We provide a contextual backdrop for articles in this issue that illustrate intelligences of multilingualisms and the linguistic citizenship of southern people. In these, southern multilingualisms are revealed as phenomena, rather than as a phenomenon defined usually in English. The intention is to suggest a third direction of mutual advantage in rethinking the social imaginary in relation to communality, entanglements and interconnectivities of both South and North.

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the 'South', who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities are encountered and mediated. During moments of North-South and South-South entanglement and exception we argue that multilingualisms re-ecologise along horizontal axes of conviviality, and / or re-index along vertical axes of exclusion. We suggest that 'rooting' and 'rerouting' multilingualisms are not only multidimensional, but they are also multifaceted as people who choose or are obliged to experience dis-placement, undertake journeys of anticipation of replacement into regulated or unregulated situations. Multilingualisms in the memories, dreams, complex selves, materiality and complicities of coping have yet to receive sufficient attention from linguists. We attempt to capture these aspects and suggest that southern multilingualisms have much to offer and entice northern multilingualisms. We illustrate how closely integrated are multilingual repertoires with mobilities and temporalities of dislocation and change; with loss, nostalgia and the anticipation of new beginnings; and with multi-scaled complicities between individuals as they re-calibrate lives in turbulent and changing circumstances.

Foreign adult students with atonal language usually have, in the beginning of their Chinesestudy, difficulties to identify the Chinese tones. On one side, only monosyllabic tones arementioned in course books during this earlier stage and to illustrate the tone contours withhands has been treated as an effective pedagogy. On the other side, research on Chinese hasfor long been solely concentrated upon the values of the fundamental frequency (F0) of thevowels in monosyllabic words. In cross-linguistic studies many factors, among others the effectsof consonants on F0 that native speakers are not aware of, have still not been paidspecial attention to.There is no consensus regarding the explanation to tone confusion patterns. Earlier theoriesof Second Language Acquisition (SLA) like Perception Assimilation Model (PAM) andSpeech Learning Model (SLM) are no longer suited for tone perception. Recently, PAMSuprasegmenthas tried to approach that the intonation of the learners’ native language is assumedto be assimilated to the Chinese tone system. However, this model ignores the wordprosody. Nowadays, when the modern Chinese vocabulary consists of a majority of disyllabicwords, research has to be re-directed to find other criteria e.g. temporal and stress for explainingthe complexity of Chinese tone perception, i.e. how two tones behave when they arecombined in one word.The purpose of this essay is to explore how native Swedish speakers learning Chinese assecond/foreign language perceive the Chinese tones of disyllabic words. The experiment isnot based on elaborated test words. The results show that tones are first of all affected by theinitial consonants and sequentially influenced by the surrounding tones with accordance toChinese. It further reveals that Swedish accent I/II patterns might be a reasonable explanationfor the Chinese tone confusion patterns since partially acoustic properties of Chinese disyllabicwords overlap the Swedish accents.These results mean that tone perception is a dynamic and complex process. Further researchon tone perception should explore profoundly and widen interaction between sounds andword prosody, which paves the way for more effective prosodic practice in language education.

Mayberry and Kluender (2017) offer a rich review of empirical research that contributes to the understanding of age-related effects on first and second language acquisition. Their keynote article compiles current, primarily linguistic and neurolinguistic, research on the notion of a critical period for language (CPL). The authors conclude “that the putative CPL applies to L1 learning, and that L2 effects are a consequence of this prior learning” (Mayberry & Kluender, 2017: p. 6). As they propose a clear role for CPL in L1 learning, and because their exact position on its role in L2 learning is, to my mind, not as clearly articulated, I will take the opportunity to argue the following: If a CPL exists at all, it should have identifiable implications for all kinds of language acquisition (cf. Gleitman & Newport, 1995). In the case of L2 acquisition what needs to be identified is how maturational constraints (implicated by a CPL) interact with other conditions that are at hand when the second language comes onto the scene.